A Delicate Strength

Memoirs of Delicate Strength Today my beloved bought me cookies and a vacuum cleaner. These cookies look like the cheapest cookies in the store. They reminded me of the early 1960s and living on the fly.

Dad boarded off and padlocked most of the pantry shelves with screws and plywood. He bought the groceries and locked them up. Dad didn’t think Mama was intelligent enough to purchase groceries. They argued often.

What he didn’t know was the felonious power of an older sister’s hairpin, and the tenacious natural appetite children have for cookies and tater chips.

Old house. Hot house. Dirt yard, flies and roaches. Alcohol. Seven children under fourteen years of age. Standing side by side, we looked like a staircase.

Love, sex, and Sunday school.

Mama’s tears in tomato gravy suppers with oleo margarine on white bread.

Then the move to the big city again — their second divorce — and into Grandma’s little two-bedroom apartment she rented upstairs.

We brought Mamie, our maid, with us. She lasted one week and never came back to that all-white neighborhood.

I was thirteen years old. Man of the house.

Eighth grade and Miss Moon.

These bittersweet memories — and many more — still linger with me, supported by writing and a mid-century modern memory that occasionally still serves me.